There are many industries that rely upon a periodic pickup of coins from their machines, in particular, the telephone and vending machine industries. The most efficient means to collect coins from phones and/or vending machines is to have the collection made when the coin box is full or almost full; thereby reducing the number of times a person empties the box. Naturally, the less times the box is required to be emptied results in a savings of man hours and hence a savings in money which can be translated into greater profits. Today, coin box pickups are scheduled depending upon the use of the particular machine, but in most cases are made when the coin box is half or less than half empty. This, as stated before, results in a wasted trip, lost labor, less profit. Industries have tried various systems for optimizing coin box collections. One of such systems is to schedule pickups based upon prior history. However, this is unreliable because it cannot take into account the day to day fluctuations in usage. A regular schedule of coin box pickups is also dangerous in that it makes the collector more susceptible to attack and theft of collected funds.
A device for optimizing the pickup of money from coin boxes would reduce labor, increase profits and reduce the danger of theft from the collector. Our device enables a person to monitor every apparatus they have from which they are responsible for picking up the proceeds from the coin boxes of said apparatuses. The monitoring of each machine or apparatus at a central office enables a person to know how much is in each coin box at any moment in time, thereby allowing one to schedule a pickup of all machines where coin boxes are substantially full. Our invention incorporates electronic means to monitor each machine or apparatus in a system, and upon command from a receiving unit cause information to be transmitted to a receiving unit for storage and/or display. The information transmitted will enable a person at a central office to determine the status of each coin box of each machine of the system being monitored.
I am not aware of any apparatus or other means that can efficiently and effectively enable a person in a central office to monitor the amount of coins in each coin box of a plurality of machines or devices in a particular system thereby enabling one to optimize the scheduling for picking up the coins of those machines whose coin boxes are substantially full. The existing methods for scheduling the collection of coins from coin box machines are inefficient, time consuming and expensive. My system for electronically monitoring the state of each coin box of each machine in a system results in the collecting of the coins from the coin box when they are substantially full, resulting in a reduction of labor for collection of almost empty boxes, thus resulting in less labor expense and hence increased profits.